I think the fact that I wanted to do it so bad sort of scared me. It brought up years and years and years of me feeling like I was packaged improperly. Not “female trapped in a male body,” per se. That was vastly oversimplifying the issue. Not even gender-fluid. (Trust me, I’d done my research.) That seemed to encapsulate something graceful—a sort of elegant transitioning between states—which sounded even further off from whatever I was. I was less a “fluid” and more a deformed solid. Like a half-eaten chocolate bar that had melted in the car and hardened into something vaguely horrific and probably inedible.

Honestly, all my research had probably only increased the confusion. There were just so many words, and labels, and ways that you could identify, the sheer volume was overwhelming. I was lost in it.

All I knew was that I felt… off. Misaligned. Sure, I didn’t feel masculine. But I didn’t feel like a fucking human being either! I was just this… thing. This thing that I fucking hated.

That was the one thing I could identify with, really.

The self-loathing.

As a general rule, I never “went to bed.” In fact, I avoided my bedroom entirely. It added a sense of claustrophobia to my need for sleep.

My brain just didn’t work like that.

Instead, I would take my meds and then read web comics on the living room sofa, or watch movies, or seek out new (or old) music, or participate in some similar nonactivity. Or, if I was particularly wired, I would deliberately solve math puzzles. For fun. (I’m telling you, I have a problem.) If I was lucky, I fell asleep—at least for a little bit. It was like Russian roulette, except I was hoping for the bullet that made everything go away.

On bad nights—the nights where I experienced a flashback reel of every terrible thing that had ever happened to me, every stupid thing I had ever said or done, every regret that haunted me like a vengeful ghost—on those nights, I would listen to my favorite song, from my favorite album, from my favorite artist, on repeat.

That artist was Sufjan Stevens, and that album was Illinois, and that song was “Chicago”—also known as “Go! CHICAGO! Go! Yeah!”

It was kind of a masterpiece. Also, an antidepressant. Also, a transcendental experience.

The trick was to enter a sort of trancelike state. Basically, I would lie flat on my back in a pitch-black room with noise-canceling headphones. I would then will myself to disintegrate. To just… dissolve. I would float up and up and up, through the ceiling, through the roof, through the stratosphere, right into outer space. And I would no longer be myself. I would be part of something greater. I would be the universe, and the universe would accept me, because the universe and I were one. Our atoms were interwoven.